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Anti-War Group Defaces ISS Page

A group of pro-Islamic crackers replaced the content on Internet Security Systems' X-Force Internet Watch page with a profane anti-war message.

A group of pro-Islamic crackers defaced a Web page belonging to Internet Security Systems Inc.s X-Force research team Monday, replacing the pages normal content with a profane anti-war message.

ISS, the huge Atlanta-based security company, removed the page from the Internet following the attack. The page, called the X-Force Internet Watch, was part of a research project. The page allowed college students to download copies of the companys Black Ice PC Protection, a personal firewall and IDS system.

An ISS spokeswoman would not go into details on the nature of the research project.

The ISS page was defaced sometime Monday afternoon by a group known as the Unix Security Guards. The group has defaced hundreds of Web sites since the onset of the war against Iraq, usually posting an anti-war diatribe on the compromised site.

Further reading

The message posted on the X-Force page read in part: "ISS hacked by ShellCode and rD of USG! F--- Bush, Blair, Sharon and … all who support the war."

The defaced page resided on "a non-critical server on an isolated network," according to a spokeswoman at ISS.

USG, reportedly made up mainly of Egyptians, Moroccans and other Middle Easterners, has been one of the few groups actively attacking sites to protest the war. During the build-up to the war and the early stages of combat, many security experts, including those at the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the FBI, warned that the invasion of Iraq could prompt elevated levels of malicious hacking.

Although the Web site of controversial satellite news channel Al-Jazeera was repeatedly knocked off-line by denial-of-service attacks in the wars early days, there has been little other activity that could be directly attributed to the war.